Friday & Sunday June 26 - 28, 2009 (diary, Charlemagne, language)

The weather remains rather strange here at the "Top End" of Australia. The nights are quite warm, around 20°C and in the mornings I wake up to a low grey cloudy sky, or even some fog. By mid morning however this has lifted again and a clear blue sky is again overhead.
As usual I played bridge with Freda Park on Friday night and also on Saturday afternoon. Saturday we came second in a competition of 12 pairs only beaten by a whisker by the top pair. Not sure whether the bottle of pink champagne I brought along worked as an incentive or handicap, but we enjoyed it anyway.

Last week I read an interesting quote from, quite extraordinary, the great Charlemagne (742-814) :

I absolutely agree with this statement. I have in fact tried to explain this in my Blog last year when I had the great opportunity to speak both German and Dutch again after many many years. But the great man has expressed it so brilliantly in just one short precise and elegant sentence.

By speaking a language of another country you (obviously) don't become a native of that country, but your whole being (emotion, spirit or "soul", mind and outlook) adjust itself to become in phase, in harmony, with the culture and essence of that country. This, to the perceptive individual, is an enormously uplifting experience. Without speaking its language you will never ever really come to grips in any significant way with the true nature of any country.

My first experience of obtaining such additional "soul" was as a student when I did my geological fieldwork in the mountains of Northern Spain for five summers in the late 50s early 60s. I lived during those months always in the country, near small villages, where the only way of communication was in Spanish. So I quickly managed to learn this language sufficiently to integrate into the local environment, which had on me, as well as my fellow geology students who went through the same experience, an enormous influence on who we felt we were. That additional "soul" is still with me to this very day.

The decision by me and my young wife Antien to emigrate to Australia in 1965, was intuitively also strongly influenced by a desire to change, to grow, to broaden our personality, to acquire that additional soul. And without a doubt we succeeded.

The problem it appears to me nowadays is that moving to a new country for many is not driven by a desire to grow and assimilate into a new country, but by a wish to flee from an old one. This (I believe) is not a move in the true spirit of emigration, but rather a subdued form of invasion by stealth, entering a foreign country while maintaining most, if not all, customs, laws, cultures of the native country. For all practical purposes this amounts to setting up a (parasitic) sattelite of their native country within another country.

It is this false attitude of the newcomers which are now increasingly be counteracted (especially in Europe) by new political movements to stop further emigration. I believe that the French President Sarkosy was quite right when he proclaimed last week that "All women in France must be treated as equals to men. Subjugation of Muslim women by their men is therefore not acceptable here!!"   Put simply : "While in Rome act like the Romans do." This has been a true motto for over 2,000 years and is still valid today.

Monday & Tuesday June 29 - 30, 2009 (diary, Graham Greene, eternity)

Most of our mango trees are in bloom now while the early ones have already shed theirs showing tiny mango fruit balls instead, of a centimeter or less in size. The crop on each tree can be very irregular, lots of fruit one year, very little the next.

Usually on a Sunday afternoon I spend some time at the Palmerston Library, browsing around for new books to read. Curiously there is a huge difference in the quality of stock between say the Libraries at the Queensland Sunshine Coast and the Northern Territory. "Down South" (as Northern Territorians refer to most of the rest of Australia) the books are all hard cover and in good condition. Up here they are a motley lot, many of them donated I suspect, mostly paperback, many with loose leaves requiring constant nursing and repair with sticky tape. The literary level on offer is also to a large extent at the lower end of the cultural scale.

Nevertheless I have found some interesting books to read here and one of last Sunday's crop was "The End of the Affair" by the English novelist Graham Greene. I have just finish reading it.

The above is just by the bye. What really struck me early on in Greene's book was a brief description of eternity. "Eternity, he writes is not an endless extension of time, but merely the total absence of it."

I find this a most intriguing idea I have never thought of before. Are concepts like eternity and infinity, really false human misconceptions derived from our inability to visualise or comprehend the true nature of space and time ??
Every time a modern physicist comes up with a new idea, test its mathematical formula and finds it resolves to the answer "infinite" he know he has got it wrong.
For a light photon, traveling from the sun to us at the speed of light the time stands still!! So from its point of view there is no time at all.
The most fundamental basic assumption ("believe") of every religion on earth is not the existence of a God (or Gods), but of the existence of eternity. For without eternity a God cannot exist.
I leave you to ponder that.